I realize that the most efficient, stable, future-proof, private and fair protocol is peer to peer. Bitcoin, Bittorrent, Tor but also B2C or eCommerce. The more direct the connection is, the better. The more atomic, the more flexible, the stronger. The less spectacular too.
I always wonder why that P2P pattern doesn’t stick well despite all its qualities and I think it’s because of communities’ attractiveness. Communities create interest, hierarchy, friction and ultimately war against other communities. It doesn’t matter how the community has been created, would it be to genuinely make things better. At some point, that community will annoy people out of it, people in another community or people inside that community who are a bit different. It’s just a matter of time. Meanwhile, individuals, us, are suddenly made invisible and irrelevant.
It’s everywhere, we see it all the time from Crimea to Mozilla. It’s a really weird problem. If history tells us that communities are poisonous, why people still bother building them then? Habits. I think it’s a thing of the past, even though we are passing debt from countries to countries today we still socialize at a tribe level. Also, greed: communities become that really efficient machine that takes control over individuals and sucks everything –time, energy, money- out of you and makes a giggling minority abusing its power in some way, at some point, always. Power is exciting and then you get drunk on it.
In a P2P system that can’t really happen it’s all about fairness, trust and peace. It’s boring, but it’s stable as fuck.
Why stability would be important? Well that’s how the universe gave us the Earth, through stability. This is how humans made insane progress in the last 60 years, through stability. This is how you raise a family at best, through a stable life. It’s a beautiful constant in this world.
We humans should stabilize our shit more. It’s boring, but someone has to do it. We’ll have fun after that. Loads.